Immigration or Invasion, continued

Heather Mac Donald on the President's speech:

Dangling strings of shiny trinkets, President Bush tried last night to make contact with the restive natives. Six thousand National Guard troops on the border! Infrared cameras! Biometric work cards! Those baubles will dazzle ‘em, the Bush speechwriters must have concluded, and they’ll never notice that we’ve changed nothing in the border-breaking status quo.

Creating a biometric card is meaningless if you don’t penalize employers who ignore it. No fortifications at the border can withstand the avalanche of people seeking to violate our laws so long as they know that once they get across the border, they’re home free in a 3,000-square-mile sanctuary zone. But Bush said nothing about worksite enforcement. If this administration wanted to end illegal immigration, it would exchange those 6,000 National Guard troops for 6000 immigration agents with the mandate to enforce the laws that Congress passed 20 years ago.

Nowhere was the White House’s contempt for the American people more manifest than in Bush’s double-talk on amnesty, however.

First he demonizes those who have argued for immigration-law enforcement and grotesquely distorts their position: “Some argue that the solution is to deport every illegal alien and that anything short of that is amnesty,” Bush alleged.

I know of no one who has called for deporting every illegal alien. Instead, thoughtful analysts like Mark Krikorian have laid out the attrition strategy: Engage in just a little bit of enforcement to create a huge deterrent effect. After DHS deported 1,500 illegal Pakistanis following 9/11, 15,000 more left on their own.
And opponents of amnesty do not argue that anything short of mass deportations equals amnesty. They make a much simpler argument: Amnesty equals amnesty. Bush’s advisers apparently think that the public can be fooled into believing that if there are a few procedural requirements to gaining legal status, the end result—amnesty—simply disappears. Those procedural requirements are themselves a joke. As Mickey Kaus has explained, Bush’s “illegals-must-wait-at-the-end-of-the-line” line is a con: by remaining in the country and jumping into the citizenship line, rather than the visa line, illegals have catapulted way ahead of law-abiding intending immigrants waiting in their home countries for a visa. But even if the procedural requirements for amnesty were grueling, the final result is the same: people who are in violation of the law are granted lawful status.

The tens of millions of aliens contemplating an illegal trip across the border will grasp that truth immediately; the Bush team thinks that the American public will not be so quick to see through the bait-and-switch bromides. The next month will tell if that gamble is right.
— Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor at City Journal.